Ceph Block Device

The most popular use of IBM Storage Ceph, the Ceph Block Device interface, also referred to as RADOS Block Device, or RBD, creates virtual volumes, images, and compute instances and stores them as a series of objects within pools. Ceph assigns these objects to placement groups and distributes or places them pseudo-randomly in OSDs throughout the cluster.

Depending upon the application consuming the Ceph Block Device interface, usually OpenStack Platform, users may create, modify, and delete volumes and images. Ceph handles the create, retrieve, update, and delete operations of each individual object.

Deleting volumes and images destroys the corresponding objects in an unrecoverable manner. However, residual data artifacts may continue to reside on storage media until overwritten. Data may also remain in backup archives.